This chapter is from the book

This chapter covers the most basic (X)HTML elementsthe ones you need to
create the structure of your document. You'll learn how to create new
paragraphs, headers, page breaks, comments, and more.

Creating a clear and consistent structure makes it that much easier to apply
styles to your document.

Starting Your Web Page

Begin your page by using a DOCTYPE (see page 38) to declare what type
of HTML or XHTML you're using. The DOCTYPE lets browsers know what to
expect and tells validators how to judge your code in order to check its syntax.
Then, signal the beginning of the actual code with the opening html tag.

Figure 3.1 Here's the DOCTYPE for a transitional HTML document as well
as the opening and closing html tags. It's a gruesome bit of text. I recommend
just copying it from one document to the next instead of trying to type all
that gobbledy-gook.

I've only shown how to write the DOCTYPE for transitional HTML and
XHTML. You can find a list of common DOCTYPE declarations on my Web site (see
page 24) or at http://www.w3.org. For help choosing an appropriate
DOCTYPE, see page 38.

Create a template with the appropriate DOCTYPE declaration and html tag
as a starting point for all your pages.

Declaring a DOCTYPE with a URL at the top of your Web page generally puts
current browsers in standards modeletting you use
standards-compliant code in order to have more control over the display of your
Web page (see page 39).

If you start an XHTML page with the xml declaration, IE 6 for Windows
goes into quirks mode. That's a huge bug. The workaround? Skip the
(optional) declaration and declare the encoding with the meta tag instead
(see page 63) .

If you use non-standard HTML tags, there's no point in specifying a
DOCTYPE. Just enclose your page in opening and closing html tags. Current
browsers will use quirks mode when displaying your pages, letting you
take advantage of old, soon-to-be-obsolete bugs (see page 39).